Wonderful insect photos

Linden Gledhill’s Flickr page contains 32 sets of photographs, half of them devoted to biology or physical phenomena in nature. You could spend hours looking at them, for they include insects, plants, insect eggs, insect parts, fungi, as well as paint splashes, astronomy shots, and travel photographs. Linden has given me permission to put up a few of his insect pictures, but be aware that they’re “copyright Linden Gledhill” and can’t be further reproduced without his permission.

I believe it was the stalwart Matthew Cobb who called my attention to Gledhill’s close-up photos of butterfly wings. The entire album is here (it’s two pages), and on that album you can click on each of the images to enlarge it. This array of thumbnails from the first page (screenshot below) looks like a wonderful patchwork quilt:

Photographers will be interested in Linden’s extensive technical notes about how he made the photos.

Here’s a ladybird beetle, showing how the “elytra” (or wing covers, features that themselves evolved from ancestral wings) are retracted to allow the true wings to produce flight. One can consider the elytra to be a vestigial character, but one that has been coopted to serve a new function: protecting the wing and the beetle and advertising its distastefulness.

I would like to share the 2 blogs of a person I had the great chance to meet in East Timor. He is just an amateur but a great spotter. Check his underwater blog and pictures from East Timor: http://www.uwet.blogspot.com/

I’m reminded here of an article that appeared in a past issue of the Daily Mail, a paper that usually I avoid, for reasons that will become obvious to anyone who visits the website. On this occasion, they featured photographs entitled “The Butterfly Alphabet”, in which wing patterns were displayed featuring every letter of the Roman alphabet, and the digits from 0 to 9. Indeed, there’s an entire Genus of butterflies (I think it’s the Genus Diaethria) that is known as the “Eighty Eights”, because of the underside wing pattern.